IT Support Small Medium Business

Last night I attempted to upgrade my CentOS 4.5 desktop to CentOS 5 and was met with miserable failure. ‘yum upgrade’ path failed due to abysmal dependency resolution. Upgrade by booting up with a CentOS 5 dvd-rom failed mysteriously with a big ERROR pop-up window just when the installer finished transfer installation image to the disk. I can only vaguely recall of this kinda trouble/misery when upgrading a RHL 5.2 desktop to RHL 6.0, or something ancient like that. Read the rest of this entry »

Although I subscribed to CentOS announce mailing list, I check CentOS’s official site every time I sit on my desk at home. After all, RHEL 5 had been released for nearly a month by now. Each every time, I was disappointed to find the CentOS 5 beta listed on the main page. Tonight, I was pleased to find CentOS 5 was released, finally, for both x86 and x86_64 architectures. The CentOS-announce mailing list post was stamped Thu Apr 12 22:36:44 UTC 2007. Up to now, I still didn’t see such a post in my gmail. Read the rest of this entry »

I was configuring two more Netgear MGR614v6 wireless routers earlier today. My laptop was plugged in one of its four LAN ports. The network connection to the Internet from the laptop went on and off as I changed the WAN and LAN settings on the wireless routers. Before I started the this wireless router configuration task, two RemoteDesktop connections were established to a remote Windows 2003 standard server, each using a different administrative account. The laptop was running up-to-date Windows XP sp2. Read the rest of this entry »

A developer alerted me that the jdk1.5.0_10 on a test server didn’t work.  A simple ‘java -version’ gave  the following error:

 Error occurred during initialization of VM
java/lang/NoClassDefFoundError: java/lang/Object

Poking around a little under /usr/java/jdk1.5.0_10,  I found that rt.jar was missing!  This version of JDK is an upgrade to accommodate the 2007 DST changes. Our current version 1.5.0_05 is just one revision older than the up-to-date release (1.5.0_06) .  I had problems installing it as a RPM on that particular server and ended up using rpm2cpio to get it in manually. The RPM was from SUN’s own download site.

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought tzdata RPM package alone should prepare RHEL/RHL/CentOS/Fedora Core linux systems for the coming 2007 DST changes. Well, it was not entirely true. It turns out many applications use a file called ‘/etc/localtime’, which is not part of tzdata, but of glibc RPM package.

Read the rest of this entry »